- Just ahead on "American Black Journal," we are continuing our series on "The Black Church in Detroit."

And this time we're gonna take a look at the impact and contributions of black Catholics.

We'll talk about their role in the civil rights movement and community outreach.

Plus we'll visit a black parish in Detroit that's celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Stay right there, "American Black Journal" starts right now.

- [Narrator] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Narrator] Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Narrator] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal" in covering African American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal" partners in presenting African American perspective about our communities and in our world.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(bright music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal," I'm Stephen Henderson.

We're continuing our special series on the "Black Church in Detroit" produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

Today we're focusing on history and impact of the black Catholic community.

Let's start with a visit to a black parish that is right around the corner from the house where my family lived when I was born on the West side of Detroit.

And it is celebrating 100 years in the city.

American Black Journal's AJ Walker has the story of the St. Charles Lwanga Parish, formerly known as Saint Cecilia's.

- [Walker] St. Charles Lwanga Parish has been a staple in Detroit for a long time.

And inside of this beautiful church, you'll find father Theodore Parker, who has been presiding over this holy place for over two decades.

Originally from New York, Father Parker has seen a lot of changes in his new home, Detroit, and his parish.

- The parish, when I came here in 2001, probably had about 600 people here at the time.

During those years we went through lots of things.

First, the collapse of the economy in Detroit, you may recall that happening.

Many of our people moved to Texas and other places.

And so our congregation really dwindled down during those years.

We have maybe 225, 250 people here now at the most.

And so it's difficult for 250 people to really make an impact.

- [Walker] Father Parker says it's difficult to make the impact that this African American church once made with dwindling numbers because it takes many people to do the work of the church and help it grow.

- In our culture today, when it comes to real, strong, membership, there are few people who really provide that anchor so that the parish, in our case this parish, keeps going.

- According to Pew Research, there are some 51 million Roman Catholics in the United States, but African Americans only make up about 4% of Catholic adults.

What are some of the biggest challenges to recruiting African Americans to the Catholic church?

- One thing I would say is that the Catholic church has to show African Americans that it's interested in them.

Our challenge is to show that a person can be African American and Catholic at the same time and can be truly both at the same time.

And there's nothing in our faith that discourages us except for those who are Catholic who reject African Americans.

And we do have Catholics in the country, some, who reject African Americans.

And so I guess the word is hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy would be the greatest challenge, the greatest difficulty.

- You said Rome was the center of Roman Catholics.

I feel like a lot of African American people may not connect with that.

If the center of our religion is in Rome where people are white, we tend to, at least these days, be looking for images that we can connect with.

So do you find that that is part of a challenge as well?

- Oh, it definitely is, it definitely is.

The black Christ that's painted in the ups of our church, that goes back to 1967, 1968, I think.

Mr. Devon Cunningham painted that picture here as a result of the parish making a real change.

And the real change was that this is becoming more and more an African American neighborhood.

And as an African American neighborhood, it should reflect the people.

- [Walker] However, not everyone feels this sentiment.

Father Parker says this mural of a black Jesus on the ceiling of the parish caused serious controversy when it was displayed in the 1960s.

- Well, people were saying, "Christ isn't black, why are you painting a black Christ there?

Isn't this against everything?"

And so there were all kinds of death threats and all of that, would you believe?

But true, death threats and all of that, they came as a result of this painting.

- [Walker] As an African-American Catholic parish, St. Charles Lwanga makes it part of their mission to make African Americans see themselves in the artwork.

- Jesus was not Swedish and Jesus was not German.

Many of the pictures that we have of Jesus were painted by a German artist, and people paint Jesus the way they are.

This particular painting back here was given to me by an inmate when I was at Fishkill Correctional Facility.

And everywhere I've gone, I've had that picture with me.

Jesus is for everyone.

Christ is cosmic.

- [Walker] It's not only the art that reflects the black roots of St. Lwanga Parish, it's the very name itself.

Father Parker says that was changed when it merged with other parishes in 2013, to reflect the people of this parish.

- We are a combination of other parishes.

From the St. Luke and St. Leo, and of course, St. Cecilia.

That was a name change that we had to get used to.

I would say not everyone was happy about that.

But it's one way to have a new beginning.

And we came up with different names, and one of the names chosen was St. Charles Lwanga.

- [Walker] Now, why Lwanga?

- Why Lwanga?

It's an African American parish and I suspect the idea is that it reflects an African American situation.

Charles Lwanga lived in the 1860s in Uganda.

And he and I think 25 others were murdered there.

- [Walker] In addition to the new name, Father Parker says they must find new ways to bolster membership and grow.

- We really need to promote ourselves more.

We have to in some way, be able to get our young people to understand what the faith is again.

That's really difficult and that's what, I know a number of priests that I know are constantly worrying about how do we do that?

And how do we really make an impact?

- A new study from the Pew Research Center shows 77% of black Catholics believe that opposing racism is an essential part of being Christian.

Focus on racial justice, civil rights, and diversity are a part of the Catholic tradition.

I explored the History of Black Catholics in Detroit with University of Detroit Mercy President, Dr. Antoine Garibaldi and Vickie Figueroa, who is Associate Director of Cultural Ministries for the Archdiocese of Detroit.

Dr. Garibaldi, I'm gonna start with you.

Of course you're the President of U of D Mercy, the largest Catholic institution really of higher ed in our state.

And it's important, I think, that U of D Mercy is in Detroit, it's been in Detroit since the beginning, and that gives it a special role, I think, when it comes to the African American community that has grown up here in Detroit and become the majority.

It's impossible to talk about, I think, black Catholicism, it's impossible to talk about Catholicism in the city of Detroit without talking about U of D. - Right.

Well, I certainly think so.

And having come from New Orleans, where my hometown was, and some of the priests who actually educated me, and I was a seminarian as well, came right here from Detroit.

They were pastors at St. George's as a matter of fact.

And so earlier in the last year or later in last year, when I gave my talk about the role of Detroit in terms of Black Catholic History, it was a delight to be able to do that, to know that there were five primarily black parishes here between the 1914 and really up until the present day, that really had a lot to do with the many black Catholics who came from the South, which is where the majority of the 3 million African American Catholics are located.

So being here at the University of Detroit Mercy has really been a very, very special privilege because of the role that they've played right here in the community.

- There's also been times when the U of D community has played a key role in the struggles that African Americans have had, linking arms with the African American community to fight for equal rights and justice.

- That's true.

So much of that history, and I refer to my years in the seminary because I was in the seminary between 1964 and 1972.

And though I was in Newburg, New York, and Washington D.C., I often used to think that the seat of a lot of the African American black Catholic movement was in Washington D.C.

But in fact, it was right here in Detroit because as I say often, 12 days after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, was the first meeting of the first Black Catholic Clergy Caucus right here in Detroit.

And the year later, the Black Sisters Conference had their national meeting as well too.

And the fact that the black secretariat, the first black secretariat in the United States was here in Detroit, makes it even more special.

And the fact that the Jesuits and the Sisters of Mercy were right here in this neighborhood really reminds us about a lot of history that many people are not aware of here.

And many of those people who experience it unfortunately, have passed on because I have four sets of cousins who came here from New Orleans in 1944, and they're in their late '80s right now and can tell me about a lot of that wonderful history.

- Vickie, I wanna talk about the history of black Catholicism in the city, but I kind of wanna start off with a little bit of a lament.

I grew up here in the '70s and '80s in Detroit and was part of the Catholic community, mostly through schooling.

And I feel like just like much of the rest of Detroit, we just have less of what we used to have when it comes to black Catholicism and black Catholic parishes.

Just as the city has kind of shrunk, this community has had its sustaining itself.

- Right.

That is a very good observation, thank you for bringing it up.

Especially during the '80s when a lot of those city parishes closed, a lot of black Catholics left, could not find a parish that they felt comfortable in, or just decided to leave the Catholic church all together and go worship somewhere else, or an even worse tragedy, not worship at all.

So the closing of the parishes, especially in the year of 1989, did have a profound effect on the black Catholic community.

One of the things that we try to do with Black Catholic Ministry is build relationships with the parishes and black Catholics who are still faithful to the black Catholic community, and then do outreach to our brothers and sisters who have left and aren't joining us in the pews.

And we try to do this through outreach, through evangelization, through conferences, through leadership development programs, through community events.

So whatever we can do to kind of rebuild our Catholic community, our black Catholic community is pretty much what my office has been charged with.

- And so what does that look like?

Rebuilding that community.

That is also happening alongside rebuilding the community more generally here in Detroit.

- That's correct.

What this looks like is, especially in the past three years since I've been part of black Catholic ministry in Detroit, what we've done is we've kind of like revamped and revived ourselves.

Last year, we put together kind of an advisory council of about 10 to 12 black Catholics, some who have only been with the church a little bit, or for a few years who are converts, and others who have been with the church for many years and have generations of family and relatives who have been part of the black Catholic experience in Detroit.

And we sat down and said, okay, considering the closing of the parishes back in the '80s, considering the great migrations of the '30s, '40s, and '50s, considering the closing of a lot of Catholic schools and considering where we are now in the Unleash the Gospel movement that the archdiocese is promoting out in our community, who are we as black Catholics and where are we and what should our priorities be to rebuild ourselves?

So they came up with many priorities, but we narrowed it down to six and those include building community, it includes building faith, Catholic schools, women's initiatives and making sure that our black Catholics don't get lost in the process of reorganizing some of our parishes called families of parishes.

So we put together what our priorities are because along with the pandemic and then some of the social justice issues of a few years ago with George Floyd, Brown Taylor, it took a toll on the black community because one of the hallmarks of black Catholic spirituality is communitarianism.

It's community, it is being together.

And when you take that away from us, because parishes had to close to keep people safe, that takes a little bit of an impact.

Actually it takes a pretty big impact on black Catholics and part of our spirituality, 'cause it's always to be together and to love up on each other.

So we took all of this into consideration, said, okay, these are the priorities that are gonna help the black Catholic community to heal again and the number one priority is community building, which is that healing process.

So that's kind of what it's gonna look like right now.

- I also wanna give you a chance to lift up a particular parish that I feel close to, Charles Lwanga, which was Saint Cecilia's.

- Yes.

- It's around the corner from the house where my family lived when I was born over on the West side.

And that parish is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that the depiction on the wall behind the altar of the black Christ there, it and was this really pivotal moment in the celebration of black Catholicism in the city.

It was painted the year after the '67 uprisings as a way of demonstrating that the city was changing, becoming more diverse and so was the black church.

- Yes, definitely.

One of the things that's very important in black Catholicism in the black Catholic community are images of black Catholics and black spiritual figures who look like us.

It's hard for us to be something that we cannot see.

So when you have images like the one at St. Charles Lwanga, which is one of my favorite places for prayer because they have an absolute wonderful pastor who's an outstanding, academic, theologian, and just a fabulous preacher, his name is Father Ted Parker, one of my favorites ever.

When you have that imagery, it really brings your faith alive when you see the black Jesus, when you see the black Madonna, when you see our six saints or our six men and women on their road to saint hood, such as Sister Thea Bowman, Mother Henriette Delille, Pierre Toussaint.

When you see these folks, you say they are Catholic, they are black Catholic, I'm a black Catholic, and I want to aspire to be like them, and I can find comfort in that black image that's before me.

- Dr. Garibaldi, I wonder if you can talk more about the role that the university is playing now in celebrating black Catholicism, the presence of black Catholics in the city, and particularly in that neighborhood where the university resides.

- Well, Steven, two things.

First of all, I need to mention my parish, my wife and I go to JSU.

So that's obviously a place that is very special to many people for many years, and people come from miles away in order to worship at JSU.

But one of the things that we started this past year was to have an annual lecture celebrating Black Catholic History month, which is in the month of November.

And there are many places around the country that have been celebrating this for a very long time.

And I was fortunate to be able to kick it off this past November.

By doing it I shouldn't say I was forced into it (laughing), because we do have some people in mind, but they thought it would be a great idea if I did it, but it is one of the ways in which we need to highlight and celebrate the role that Black Catholic History has played here in the city of Detroit.

So by doing this lecture series, it's a way to kind of bring people together.

There are lots of young people and people who are of our age, who would not have known about that history because they were not around.

And when you mention people like sister Thea Bowman, who was a dear friend of mine as a young seminarian, and even Bishop Moses Anderson, who was one of the early African American bishops in this country, he was only the seventh black bishops in the United States in the mid '70s.

There are a lot of people who have been here and who played such an important role, and we really want to spend more time talking about that history and also talking about what we're doing now.

And Vickie's been doing a great job throughout the archdiocese, but we cannot let that history pass.

When I read that Pew Research Center study talking about the fact that black Catholics, for the most part in this country, do not go to parishes where they are the majority.

Well, before the 1970s they had no other choice than to go in the South in particular, to parishes that were primarily African American because segregation existed.

Segregation existed in New Orleans when I was in school.

Before 1965, I couldn't go to a high where the student body was primarily white.

But those things have changed and it's important to really remind people about that because it shows the strength of African American history and the African American faith.

And my mother was raised Catholic, my father was AME.

And my father was married to my mother for 20 years before he converted.

But all eight of my siblings plus me were educated in Catholic schools and high schools, and fortunately most of us were able to go to college at Xavier in New Orleans for example.

But that's important history because it shows the strength of African American Catholicism.

Cardinal Gregory's elevation last year to Cardinal, we all said it's about time.

There are lots of great candidates, but he's a wonderful man, a convert to the faith as well, and a great example of just showing how that faith has been so secure and so strong for so many years.

- Vickie, I wanna give you a chance to talk a little about schools as well.

Like I said, '70s and '80s, that was a real option for black parents and an alternative, I suppose.

It's less so now.

Is restoring more of that, I guess, one of the focuses that the archdiocese is really embracing as we try to regrow the city?

- I believe they are.

They are looking at special initiatives to make Catholic education available to all families who want access to it.

So that is one of the things they're gonna be working on.

And you'll hear more about that coming in the near future.

Catholic schools are dear to my heart.

I'm a transplant from Ohio, I've been here though 25 plus years, so I'm almost a Detroiter.

But I went to Catholic schools and it transformed my life.

It empowered me to believe in myself and change my life, go to college, become part of the middle class.

And this is something that Catholic schools do very, very well, is that they offer high quality education and they give children in the inner city, African American children, the chance to improve their lives, change classes, so to speak, and then improve the lives as others.

Because when black children go to college, they become lawyers, they become doctors, they become nurses, educators.

So they have kind of this multiplying effect on the generations coming up after them.

So one of the things that we're gonna do with the Black Catholic Advisory Board, one of the priorities we are looking at of course, is youth.

And how can we encourage more African American youth into our Catholic schools in lieu of, there's a lot of competition out there for those students between charter schools and public schools and other schools getting the attention of our kids.

How do we create a product or advertise or market a product that parents will see as superior in terms of faith education and academic education that will prepare their kids for college?

So it's still a viable option, but we still have some work to do.

- That is gonna do it for us this week.

Thanks for watching.

You can find out more about our guests and see all of our black church in Detroit episodes at americanblackjournal.org.

Plus you can always connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Take care and we'll see you next time.

(bright music) - [Narrator] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Narrator] Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Narrator] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal" in covering African American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle music)